Verification of Forbidden Behavior in EPCs

Event-driven process chains (EPCs) are frequently used as a modeling language for the representation of business processes. As such, business analysts are familiar with using EPC models in the context of business process management. Up to now, there is no verification technique available that allows business analysts to express forbidden behavior in an intuitive manner. In this paper, we discuss the specification of such forbidden behavior with the aid of EPCs and demonstrate the verification of this behavior against models of the desired behavior, also formulated as EPC diagrams. For this purpose, a novel approach to join EPC models and to interpret the result is discussed. It is based on a transformation of both EPC models to Module nets, a specific kind of Petri nets, and the application of verification methods already defined for this net class. The findings are illustrated with a running example that picks up an EPC process model from the SAP reference model.